The obvious challenge for depicting this kind of material is tone. And that’s just the beginning of the story. These were comfortable, middle-class Norwegian kids from stable families who did all this seemingly because they were just really bored. There were other, more lurid rumors as well - about Euronymous eating Dead’s brains, about him making necklaces out of the pieces of Dead’s skull. At some point in the early ’90s, there was a Norwegian black metal band called “Mayhem.” When its singer, Dead - who used to bury his stage clothes and dig them up before shows so that he could more authentically embody his stage name, and was known to huff a dead bird he kept in a bag - blew his head off with a shotgun one day, his guitarist, Euronymous, took pictures of Dead’s corpse and made it Mayhem’s next album cover. It’s hard to hear any of it without wishing it was a movie. The film has apparently been in development for quite some time, and for good reason: the details of this story are unforgettable.

It’s that story, of Euronymous, the band Mayhem, the record store Hell, Varg Vikernes aka Count Grishnackh, Death, and the whole Norwegian black metal gang, that director Jonas Akerlund ( Spun) and his co-writer Dennis Magnusson set out to tell in Lords Of Chaos (adapting from Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind’s book, though they didn’t keep much beyond the title and information from some of the primary source interviews). Some Norwegian kids got into satanic heavy metal, took it way too far, burnt down ancient churches, put an actual headless suicide corpse on an album cover, and eventually started killing each other. It’s an irresistible story, lurid and somehow equal parts goofy and macabre. It’s hard to remember now where it was I read that first article on Norwegian black metal back in the ’90s because since then I’ve read and watched everything I could find on the subject.

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